First of all we would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! We trust that this year will be full of good challenges and significant achievements for each of you!

Regarding metrics, if it's one thing that engineers love, it's numbers... And if it's one thing that managers love, it's status. Put the two together and oftentimes you have teams that track tons of metrics across all facets of their projects.

While it may give the impression of being really thorough, and providing all sorts of deep insights, if you find yourself in an organization that tracks lots and lots of metrics, then I would encourage you to take a step back and limit the focus to just what's really important.

One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto reads, "Working software is the primary measure of progress." If you stop and think about it, that principle makes perfect sense. Customers aren't going to buy untested code and they're not going to be too happy if they buy something that falls down broken all the time because major defects haven't been fixed. All other metrics should pale in comparison to the one metric of having working software. Putting focus on this one metric will drive many of the benefits that agile promises -- three of which I'll touch on here.

First, focusing primarily on having working software provides a shared, common goal for the organization. This means that no one on the team gets any credit for his or her individual efforts which, in turn, provides plenty of motivation for helping each other out so that the team can take credit for having working software. A lot of the old "us vs. them" mentality of waterfall days is eliminated when focus is placed on working software as the primary measure of progress.

Next, having the focus on working software means that teams will actually achieve working software much earlier in a project than was typical with waterfall projects. Having working software provides plenty of opportunities to involve customers earlier in the project since customers can actually see demos of the functionality while it is being implemented and can even download it and test-drive it in their own environments. Getting customer feedback early is a huge benefit, especially if customers tell you you're going down the wrong path since you'll be able to make mid-course corrections prior to releasing the product.

Finally, having working software enables teams to move into the DevOps space where automation takes on an even more significant role, where releases are more frequent (up to multiple times a day for some Software-as-a-Service offerings), and where opportunities for doing things like "A/B" testing can be pursued. None of this is possible without having working software.

To conclude, if you agree that focusing on working software as the primary measure of project progress makes sense, but you're not quite sure how to ditch many of the metrics you may be currently tracking, I'll leave you with this analogy that Leslie uses with teams when dealing with this very issue. Think of cleaning out your closet -- you pull everything out and then put back only those things you wish to keep. Everything else is either thrown away or donated to charity. So, start with a "clean slate," put working software at the top of the list, and then add only those additional metrics that are absolutely necessary to ensure project success. Tracking anything else beyond just what's absolutely necessary should be considered a waste.

We would be interested in your thoughts and comments, especially if you've already made the transition to tracking working software as your primary metric. Thank you!